Amaranth Cafe
Today I took my friends to lunch at Amaranth Café my favorite lunch place. Amaranth offers homemade soups each day, fresh bread and bakery items, good coffee, delicious salads. They used, whenever possible, local products and the Café extends out to the community, sponsoring art, gardens and creative youth activities.
The business of the Café represents the complete opposite of what Wal-Mart represents. The owners of the Café are generous contributors to the community quite the opposite of the Walton family, owners of Wal-Mart. Employees receive a decent wage, they are local owned and operated, purchase local products, use healthy ingredients for all their food, just the opposite of Wal-Mart.
I was glad to hear today from one of the owner’s that he had resigned from the Board of Directors of Growing Power and did not approve of Growing Power taking a million dollars from Wal-Mart.
Amaranth represents many principles of living in community that I endorse and encourage and try to do. When I took my friend Prasad, a follower of Gandhi from India, there once he noted that this business perfectly represented the principal Swadeshi of Gandhi, “the use and service of our immediate surroundings over those more remote or foreign.” In economic terms for Amaranth Café “it is the insistence on the use of local goods made by local communities and in one’s own country, and preferably hand-made or home grown.” Now is that not the opposite of Wal-Mart.
To me Amaranth and its off spring operations represent to me the principle of Subsidiarity which is “an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.” Wal-Mart is centrally owned and controlled.
One of the areas family owners of Wal-Mart have over owners of Amaranth is monthly. It is estimated that the Walton family is collectively worth about 92 billion dollars as of December, 2011. I do not think the owners of Amaranth can even come to a fraction of that wealth. However, I do not go into Wal-Mart unless in service of friend but I cannot wait to take friends to Amaranth Café.
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